Books in the Synthesis Lectures on Visual Computing: Computer Graphics, Animation, Computational Photography and Imaging series

This book gives a broad overview of research on sound simulation driven by a variety of applications. Vibrating objects produce sound, which then propagates through a medium such as air or water before finally being heard by a listener. As a crucial sensory channel, sound plays a vital role in many applications. There is a well-established research community in acoustics that has studied the problems related to sound simulation for six decades. Some of the earliest work was motivated by the design of concert halls, theaters, or lecture rooms with good acoustic characteristics. These problems also have been investigated in other applications, including noise control and sound design for urban planning, building construction, and automotive applications. Moreover, plausible or realistic sound effects can improve the sense of presence in a virtual environment or a game. In these applications, sound can provide important clues such as source directionality and spatial size. The book first surveys various sound synthesis methods, including harmonic synthesis, texture synthesis, spectral analysis, and physics-based synthesis. Next, it provides an overview of sound propagation techniques, including wave-based methods, geometric-based methods, and hybrid methods. The book also summarizes various techniques for sound rendering. Finally, it surveys some recent trends, including the use of machine learning methods to accelerate sound simulation and the use of sound simulation techniques for other applications such as speech recognition, source localization, and computer-aided design.

Physics-based animation is commonplace in animated feature films and even special effects for live-action movies. Think about a recent movie and there will be some sort of special effects such as explosions or virtual worlds. Cloth simulation is no different and is ubiquitous because most virtual characters (hopefully!) wear some sort of clothing.The focus of this book is physics-based cloth simulation. We start by providing background information and discuss a range of applications. This book provides explanations of multiple cloth simulation techniques. More specifically, we start with the most simple explicitly integrated mass-spring model and gradually work our way up to more complex and commonly used implicitly integrated continuum techniques in state-of-the-art implementations. We give an intuitive explanation of the techniques and give additional information on how to efficiently implement them on a computer.This book discusses explicit and implicit integration schemes for cloth simulation modeled with mass-spring systems. In addition to this simple model, we explain the more advanced continuum-inspired cloth model introduced in the seminal work of Baraff and Witkin [1998]. This method is commonly used in industry.We also explain recent work by Liu et al. [2013] that provides a technique to obtain fast simulations. In addition to these simulation approaches, we discuss how cloth simulations can be art directed for stylized animations based on the work of Wojan et al. [2016]. Controllability is an essential component of a feature animation film production pipeline. We conclude by pointing the reader to more advanced techniques.

This book provides beginners in computer graphics and related fields a guide to the concepts, models, and technologies for realistic rendering of material appearance. It provides a complete and thorough overview of reflectance models and acquisition setups, along with providing a selection of the available tools to explore, visualize, and render the reflectance data. Reflectance models are under continuous development, since there is still no straightforward solution for general material representations. Every reflectance model is specific to a class of materials. Hence, each has strengths and weaknesses, which the book highlights in order to help the reader choose the most suitable model for any purpose. The overview of the acquisition setups will provide guidance to a reader who needs to acquire virtual materials and will help them to understand which measurement setup can be useful for a particular purpose, while taking into account the performance and the expected cost derived from the required components. The book also describes several recent open source software solutions, useful for visualizing and manipulating a wide variety of reflectance models and data.

In image processing and computer vision applications such as medical or scientific image data analysis, as well as in industrial scenarios, images are used as input measurement data. It is good scientific practice that proper measurements must be equipped with error and uncertainty estimates. For many applications, not only the measured values but also their errors and uncertainties, should be-and more and more frequently are-taken into account for further processing. This error and uncertainty propagation must be done for every processing step such that the final result comes with a reliable precision estimate. The goal of this book is to introduce the reader to the recent advances from the field of uncertainty quantification and error propagation for computer vision, image processing, and image analysis that are based on partial differential equations (PDEs). It presents a concept with which error propagation and sensitivity analysis can be formulated with a set of basic operations. The approach discussed in this book has the potential for application in all areas of quantitative computer vision, image processing, and image analysis. In particular, it might help medical imaging finally become a scientific discipline that is characterized by the classical paradigms of observation, measurement, and error awareness. This book is comprised of eight chapters. After an introduction to the goals of the book (Chapter 1), we present a brief review of PDEs and their numerical treatment (Chapter 2), PDE-based image processing (Chapter 3), and the numerics of stochastic PDEs (Chapter 4). We then proceed to define the concept of stochastic images (Chapter 5), describe how to accomplish image processing and computer vision with stochastic images (Chapter 6), and demonstrate the use of these principles for accomplishing sensitivity analysis (Chapter 7). Chapter 8 concludes the book and highlights new research topics for the future.

This synthesis lecture presents an intuitive introduction to the mathematics of motion and deformation in computer graphics. Starting with familiar concepts in graphics, such as Euler angles, quaternions, and affine transformations, we illustrate that a mathematical theory behind these concepts enables us to develop the techniques for efficient/effective creation of computer animation.This book, therefore, serves as a good guidepost to mathematics (differential geometry and Lie theory) for students of geometric modeling and animation in computer graphics. Experienced developers and researchers will also benefit from this book, since it gives a comprehensive overview of mathematical approaches that are particularly useful in character modeling, deformation, and animation.

Heritage sites across the world have witnessed a number of natural calamities, sabotage and damage from visitors, resulting in their present ruined condition. Many sites are now restricted to reduce the risk of further damage. Yet these masterpieces are significant cultural icons and critical markers of past civilizations that future generations need to see. A digitally reconstructed heritage site could diminish further harm by using immersive navigation or walkthrough systems for virtual environments. An exciting key element for the viewer is observing fine details of the historic work and viewing monuments in their undamaged form. This book presents image super-resolution methods and techniques for automatically detecting and inpainting damaged regions in heritage monuments, in order to provide an enhanced visual experience.The book presents techniques to obtain higher resolution photographs of the digitally reconstructed monuments, and the resulting images can serve as input to immersive walkthrough systems. It begins with the discussion of two novel techniques for image super-resolution and an approach for inpainting a user-supplied region in the given image, followed by a technique to simultaneously perform super-resolution and inpainting of given missing regions. It then introduces a method for automatically detecting and repairing the damage to dominant facial regions in statues, followed by a few approaches for automatic crack repair in images of heritage scenes. This book is a giant step toward ensuring that the iconic sites of our past are always available, and will never be truly lost.

New data acquisition techniques are emerging and are providing fast and efficient means for multidimensional spatial data collection. Airborne LIDAR surveys, SAR satellites, stereo-photogrammetry and mobile mapping systems are increasingly used for the digital reconstruction of the environment. All these systems provide extremely high volumes of raw data, often enriched with other sensor data (e.g., beam intensity). Improving methods to process and visually analyze this massive amount of geospatial and user-generated data is crucial to increase the efficiency of organizations and to better manage societal challenges. Within this context, this book proposes an up-to-date view of computational methods and tools for spatio-temporal data fusion, multivariate surface generation, and feature extraction, along with their main applications for surface approximation and rainfall analysis. The book is intended to attract interest from different fields, such as computer vision, computer graphics, geomatics, and remote sensing, working on the common goal of processing 3D data. To this end, it presents and compares methods that process and analyze the massive amount of geospatial data in order to support better management of societal challenges through more timely and better decision making, independent of a specific data modeling paradigm (e.g., 2D vector data, regular grids or 3D point clouds). We also show how current research is developing from the traditional layered approach, adopted by most GIS softwares, to intelligent methods for integrating existing data sets that might contain important information on a geographical area and environmental phenomenon. These services combine traditional map-oriented visualization with fully 3D visual decision support methods and exploit semantics-oriented information (e.g., a-priori knowledge, annotations, segmentations) when processing, merging, and integrating big pre-existing data sets.

Path planning and navigation are indispensable components for controlling autonomous agents in interactive virtual worlds. Given the growing demands on the size and complexity of modern virtual worlds, a number of new techniques have been developed for achieving intelligent navigation for the next generation of interactive multi-agent simulations. This book reviews the evolution of several related techniques, starting from classical planning and computational geometry techniques and then gradually moving toward more advanced topics with focus on recent developments from the work of the authors. The covered topics range from discrete search and geometric representations to planning under different types of constraints and harnessing the power of graphics hardware in order to address Euclidean shortest paths and discrete search for multiple agents under limited time budgets. The use of planning algorithms beyond path planning is also discussed in the areas of crowd animation and whole-body motion planning for virtual characters.

This book serves as a practical guide to simulation of 3D deformable solids using the Finite Element Method (FEM). It reviews a number of topics related to the theory and implementation of FEM approaches: measures of deformation, constitutive laws of nonlinear materials, tetrahedral discretizations, and model reduction techniques for real-time simulation. Simulations of deformable solids are important in many applications in computer graphics, including film special effects, computer games, and virtual surgery. The Finite Element Method has become a popular tool in many such applications. Variants of FEM catering to both offline and real-time simulation have had a mature presence in computer graphics literature. This book is designed for readers familiar with numerical simulation in computer graphics, who would like to obtain a cohesive picture of the various FEM simulation methods available, their strengths and weaknesses, and their applicability in various simulation scenarios. The book is also a practical implementation guide for the visual effects developer, offering a lean yet adequate synopsis of the underlying mathematical theory. Chapter 1 introduces the quantitative descriptions used to capture the deformation of elastic solids, the concept of strain energy, and discusses how force and stress result as a response to deformation. Chapter 2 reviews a number of constitutive models, i.e., analytical laws linking deformation to the resulting force that has successfully been used in various graphics-oriented simulation tasks. Chapter 3 summarizes how deformation and force can be computed discretely on a tetrahedral mesh, and how an implicit integrator can be structured around this discretization. Finally, chapter 4 presents the state of the art in model reduction techniques for real-time FEM solid simulation and discusses which techniques are suitable for which applications. Topics discussed in this chapter include linear modal analysis, modal warping, subspace simulation, and domain decomposition.

As we increase our reliance on computer-generated information, often using it as part of our decision-making process, we must devise tools to assess the correctness of that information. Consider, for example, software embedded on vehicles, used for simulating aircraft performance, or used in medical imaging. In those cases, software correctness is of paramount importance as there's little room for error. Software verification is one of the tools available to attain such goals. Verification is a well known and widely studied subfield of computer science and computational science and the goal is to help us increase confidence in the software implementation by verifying that the software does what it is supposed to do. The goal of this book is to introduce the reader to software verification in the context of visualization. In the same way we became more dependent on commercial software, we have also increased our reliance on visualization software. The reason is simple: visualization isthe lens through which users can understand complex data, and as such it must be verified. The explosion in our ability to amass data requires tools not only to store and analyze data, but also to visualize it. This book is comprised of six chapters. After an introduction to the goals of the book, we present a brief description of both worlds of visualization (Chapter 2) and verification (Chapter 3). We then proceed to illustrate the main steps of the verification pipeline for visualization algorithms. We focus on two classic volume visualization techniques, namely, Isosurface Extraction (Chapter 4) and Direct Volume Rendering (Chapter 5). We explain how to verify implementations of those techniques and report the latest results in the field of verification of visualization techniques. The last chapter concludes the book and highlights new research topics for the future.

In geometry processing and shape analysis, several applications have been addressed through the properties of the Laplacian spectral kernels and distances, such as commute time, biharmonic, diffusion, and wave distances.Within this context, this book is intended to provide a common background on the definition and computation of the Laplacian spectral kernels and distances for geometry processing and shape analysis. To this end, we define a unified representation of the isotropic and anisotropic discrete Laplacian operator on surfaces and volumes; then, we introduce the associated differential equations, i.e., the harmonic equation, the Laplacian eigenproblem, and the heat equation. Filtering the Laplacian spectrum, we introduce the Laplacian spectral distances, which generalize the commute-time, biharmonic, diffusion, and wave distances, and their discretization in terms of the Laplacian spectrum. As main applications, we discuss the design of smooth functions and the Laplacian smoothing of noisy scalar functions.All the reviewed numerical schemes are discussed and compared in terms of robustness, approximation accuracy, and computational cost, thus supporting the reader in the selection of the most appropriate with respect to shape representation, computational resources, and target application.